A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  And how long ago should we have retired you, my boy? he wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? How many miles have you had in the saddle? How many miles of exposed film have you rolled into how many newspapers? How many miles of newspaper have you dropped into dead letter boxes and tossed over cemetery walls? How many hours have you listened to Prague radio, seated over your code pads?

  He lowered his window. The racing air smelt of silage and wood smoke and it thrilled him. Brotherhood was country stock. His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates. With the morning wind pouring into his face, he became a raggedy-arsed boy again, galloping Miss Sumner’s hunter bareback across her park and getting the hiding of his life for it. He was freezing to death in the flat mud of the Suffolk fens, too proud to go home without a catch. He was making his first drop from a barrage balloon at Abingdon Aerodrome and discovering how the wind kept his mouth open after he yelled. I’ll leave when they throw me out. I’ll leave when you and I have had our word, my boy.

  He had slept six hours in forty-eight, most of them on a lumpy camp bed in a room set aside for typists with the vapours, but he was not tired. “Can we have you for a minute, Jack?” said Kate, the Fifth Floor vestal, with a look that stayed on him a beat too long. “Bo and Nigel would like another small word.” And when he wasn’t sleeping or answering the telephone or thinking his usual puzzled thoughts about Kate, he had watched his life go by in a kind of bewildered free fall into enemy territory: so this is what it’s like, this is badland and these are my feet spinning towards it like a sycamore twig. He had contemplated Pym in all the stages he had grown up with him, drunk with him and worked with him, including a night in Berlin he had totally forgotten until now when they had ended up screwing a couple of army nurses in adjoining rooms. He had remembered contemplating his own mangled arm on the winter’s day in 1943 when it had hung beside him embellished with three German machine-gun bullets, and he had experienced the same feeling of incredulous detachment.

  “If you could only have let us know a little earlier, Jack. If only you could have seen it coming.”

  Yes, I’m sorry, Bo. Careless of me.

  “But Jack, he was practically your own son, we used to say.”

  Yes, we did, didn’t we, Bo. Silly really, I agree.

  And Kate’s reproving eyes, as ever, saying, Jack, Jack, where are you?

  There had been other cases in his lifetime, naturally. Ever since the war had ended, Brotherhood’s professional life had been regularly turned upside down by the Firm’s latest terminal scandal. While he was Head of Station in Berlin, it had happened to him not twice but three times: night telegrams, flash, for Brotherhood’s eyes only. Phone call—where is he? Jack, get off your elbows and get in here now. Race through wet streets, dead sober. Telegram one, the subject of my immediately following telegram is a member of this service and has now been revealed as a Soviet Intelligence agent. You will inform your official contacts of this in confidence before they read it in the morning papers. Followed by the long wait beside the codebooks while you think: is it him, is it her, is it me? Telegram two, spell a name of six letters, who the hell do I know who’s got six letters? First group M—Christ, it’s Miller! Second group A—oh my God, it’s Mackay! Until up comes a name you never heard of, from a section you didn’t know existed, and when the expurgated case history finally arrives on your desk all you have is a vision of an under-welfared little nancy-boy in the cypher room in Warsaw who thought he was playing the world’s game when what he really wanted was to shaft his employers.

  But these distant scandals had been till now the gunfire of a war he was certain would never come his way. He had regarded them not as warnings but as confirmation of everything he disliked about the way the Firm was going: its retreat into bureaucracy and semi-diplomacy, its pandering to American methods and example. By comparison his own hand-picked staff had only looked better to him, and when the witch-hunters had gathered at his door, led by Grant Lederer and his nasty little Mormon bag-carriers, baying for Pym’s blood and brandishing fanciful suspicions based on nothing more than a few computerised coincidences, it was Jack Brotherhood who had banged his open hand upon the conference table and made the water-glasses hop: “Stop this now. There’s not a man or woman in this room who won’t look like a traitor once you start to pull our life stories inside out. A man can’t remember where he was on the night of the tenth? Then he’s lying. He can remember? Then he’s too damn flip with his alibi. You go one more yard with this and everyone who tells the truth will become a barefaced liar, everyone who does a decent job will be working for the other side. You carry on like this and you’ll sink our service better than the Russians ever could. Or is that what you want?”

  And God help him, with his reputation and his anger and his connections and with his section’s record, in the modern jargon that he loathed, of low cost and high productivity, he had carried the day, never thinking for a moment that another day might come where he wished he hadn’t.

  Closing his window Brotherhood stopped the car in a village where no one knew him. He was too early. He had needed to get out of London, out of touch, away from Kate’s brown stare. Give him one more hopeless damage-limitation conference, one more session on how to keep it from the Americans, one more glance of pity or reproach from Kate, or of plain hatred from Bo’s grey army of suburban mandarins, and possibly, just possibly, Jack Brotherhood might have said things that everyone, but most of all himself, would afterwards have regretted. So he had volunteered for this errand instead, and Bo with rare promptness had said what a good idea, who better? And he knew as soon as he cleared Bo’s doorway that they were as glad to see him go as he was to leave. Except for Kate.

  “Just do keep phoning in if you don’t mind,” Bo called after him. “Three-hourly at most. Kate will know the score. Won’t you, Kate?”

  Nigel followed him down the corridor. “When you phone in, I want you coming through Secretariat. You’re not to use his direct line and I shall need to speak to you first.”

  “And that’s an order,” Brotherhood suggested.

  “It’s a temporary licence and it can be withdrawn at any time.”

  The church had a wooden porch, a footpath led beside a playing field. He passed a farmyard with brick barns and smelt warm milk on the autumn air.

  “We evacuate them in echelons, Jack,” Frankel is saying in his hand-pressed Euro-English. “That’s if we evacuate them at all.”

  “And on my say-so,” Nigel adds from the wings.

  The room is low and windowless and overlit. A uniformed guard mans the peephole. Spaced along the wall sit Frankel’s greying female assistants at their trestle desks. They have brought thermos flasks and share each other’s cigarettes. They have done it all before, like a day at the races. Frankel is fat and ugly, a Latvian headwaiter. Brotherhood recruited him, Brotherhood promoted him. Now he was taking over Brotherhood’s mess. So it goes. It is three in the morning. It is today, six hours ago.

  “Day one, Jack, we move only head agents,” says Frankel with a doctor’s false assurance. “Conger and Watchman in Prague, Voltaire in Budapest, Merryman in Gdansk.”

  “When do we begin?” says Brotherhood.

  “When Bo waves the flag, and not before,” says Nigel. “We’re still evaluating and we still regard Pym’s loyalties as quite possibly impeccable,” says Nigel, like somebody mastering a tongue-twister.

  “We move them very quietly, Jack,” says Frankel. “No goodbyes, no flowers for the neighbours, no finding somewhere for the cat. Day two radio operators, day three the cut-outs, subagents. Day four whoever’s left.”

  “How do we reach them?” Brotherhood asks.

  “You don’t, we do,” says Nigel. “If and when the Fifth Floor says it’s necessary, which at the moment, I repeat, is pure hypothesis.”

  Kate has followed them in. Kate is our widowed English spinster, pale and sculptural and beautiful, who at forty mourns the loves she nev
er had. And Kate is still Kate, he can see it as clear as ever in her eyes.

  “Maybe we pick them off the street when they go to work,” Frankel continues. “Maybe we bang on the door, tell a friend, leave a note somewhere. Just anything we think of, so long as it wasn’t done before.”

  “That’s where you’ll be able to help if we get that far,” Nigel explains. “Telling us what’s been done before.”

  Frankel has paused before a map of Eastern Europe. Brotherhood waits a step behind him. Head agents red, subagents blue. So much easier to kill a pushpin than a man. Still gazing at the map Brotherhood remembers an evening in Vienna. Pym is playing host, Brotherhood is Colonel Peter bringing London’s thanks for ten years’ service. He remembers Pym’s gracious speech in Czech, the champagne and medals, the handshakes, the assurances, the quiet waltzes to the gramophone. And this dumpy couple in brown, he a physicist, she a senior lady in the Czech Ministry of the Interior, lovers in betrayal, their faces glistening with excitement as they whirl round the drawing-room to the strains of Johann Strauss.

  “So when do you start?” Brotherhood asks again.

  “Jack, that is Bo’s judgment,” Nigel insists, dangerously patient.

  “Jack, the Fifth Floor has ruled that the most important thing is to look busy, act natural, keep everything normal,” says Frankel, picking a sheaf of telegrams from his desk. “They use letter boxes? So clear the letter boxes like normal. They got radio? So send radio like normal, stick to all the normal schedules, hope the opposition are listening.”

  “That’s the most important thing at the moment,” Nigel says, as if anything Frankel says is invalid until he says it too. “Total normality in all areas. One premature step would be fatal.”

  “So would a late one,” Brotherhood says as his blue eyes start to catch fire.

  “They’re waiting for you, Jack,” Kate says, meaning, come away, there’s nothing you can do.

  Brotherhood does not move. “Do it now,” he tells Frankel. “Take them into the embassies. Broadcast a warning. Abort.”

  Nigel doesn’t say a word. Frankel looks to him for help but Nigel has folded his arms and is looking over the shoulder of one of Frankel’s women while she types a signal.

  “Jack, no way do we take those Joes into embassies or consulates,” Frankel says, making faces in Nigel’s direction. “Verboten. The most we can do when we get the order from the Fifth Floor is fresh escape papers, is money, transport, a couple of prayers. That right, Nigel?”

  “If you get the order,” Nigel corrects him.

  “Conger will head east,” Brotherhood says. “His daughter’s at university in Bucharest. He’ll go to her.”

  “Okay, so where does he go from Bucharest?” says Frankel.

  Brotherhood is nearly shouting. There is nothing Kate can do to stop him. “South into bloody Bulgaria, what do you think! If we give him a date and place, we can put a plane in, hedgehop him into Yugoslavia!”

  Now Frankel also lifts his voice. “Jack. Hear me, okay? Nigel, confirm this for me so I don’t sound too negative all the time. No little planes, no embassies, no frontier crashes of any kind. This is not the sixties any more. Not the fifties, not the forties. We don’t drop planes and pilots around Eastern Europe like birdseed. We are not enthusiastic about reception committees for ourselves or our Joes that are laid on by the opposition.”

  “He’s got it straight,” Nigel confirms with just enough surprise.

  “I got to tell you this, Jack. Your networks are so contaminated at this moment that the Foreign Office wouldn’t even drop them in the trash can, would they, Nigel? You are isolated, Jack. Whitehall’s got to cover itself in polythene before it shakes your hand. Is this correct, Nigel?” Frankel hears himself and stops. He looks to Nigel yet again but receives no comforting word. He catches Brotherhood’s eye and stares at him with a long and unexpected fearfulness, the way we look at monuments and find ourselves contemplating our own mortality. “I take orders, Jack. Don’t look at me that way. Cheers.”

  Brotherhood slowly climbs the stairs. Climbing them ahead of him, Kate slows down and trails a couple of fingers for him to take hold of. He pretends he hasn’t seen.

  “When will I see you?” she says.

  Brotherhood has gone deaf as well.

  The responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of Tom Pym that morning were as heavy as any he had been obliged to face during his first month as a school prefect and captain of Pandas. Today was the first of Pandas’ duty week. Today, and for the six awesome days to follow, Tom must ring the morning bell, assist Matron to supervise showers and call the roll before breakfast. Today being Sunday he must keep charge of letter-writing in the day room, read the Lesson in chapel and inspect the changing rooms for untidiness and impropriety. When evening came at last he must preside over the boys’ committee that receives suggestions about the management of school life and, after editing, submit them to the agonised consideration of Mr. Caird the Headmaster, for Mr. Caird could do nothing lightly and saw all sides of every argument. And when he had somehow got through all this and rung the bell for lights out, there was Monday to wake up to. Last week it had been Lions’ turn for duty and Lions had done well. Lions, Mr. Caird had pronounced in a rare show of conviction, had displayed a democratic approach to power, holding votes and forming committees on every contentious issue. In chapel, waiting for the last lines of the hymn to die, Tom prayed earnestly for his dead grandfather’s soul, for Mr. Caird and for victory in Wednesday’s squash match against St. Saviour’s, Newbury, away, though he feared it would be another humiliating defeat, for Mr. Caird was divided on the merits of athletic competition. But most fervently he prayed that come next Saturday—if Saturday ever did come—Pandas too would earn Mr. Caird’s favour, because Mr. Caird’s disappointment was actually more than Tom could bear.

  Tom was a very tall boy and affected already the British administrator’s bobbing walk that characterised his father. His receding hair-line gave him an air of maturity that may have accounted for his advancement to high position in the school. To watch him, hands linked behind his back, detach himself from the prefect’s pew, step into the aisle, duck his head at the altar and mount the two steps to the lectern, you could have been forgiven for wondering whether this was a pupil at all and not a member of Mr. Caird’s impressively youthful staff. Only his froggy voice as he barked the day’s text betrayed the changeling inside the senatorial exterior. Tom heard little of what he was reading. The Lesson was the first he had read and he had practised it till he knew it by heart. Yet now that he came to perform it, the red and black print before him had neither sound nor meaning. Only the sight of his chewed thumbs stuck either side of him on the lectern, and the white head floating above them in the back row of the congregation, held him to the world at all. Without them, he decided, he could have taken off, smack through the chapel ceiling and into the sky, and thereafter levitated, like his gas balloon on Commemoration Day, which flew all the way to Maidenhead and landed with his name on it in an old lady’s back garden, earning him five pounds in book tokens and a letter from her saying she too had a son called Tom, who worked at Lloyd’s.

  “I have trodden the winepress alone,” he bellowed to his surprise. “And of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury.” The threat alarmed him and he wondered why he had uttered it and to whom. “And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”

  Still reading, feeling the backs of his knees batting against his trousers, Tom considered a number of other matters that turned out to be weighing on his mind, some of which were new to him until this moment. He had no expectation any more that his mind would be ruled by what was going on around it, even in work. In Friday’s gym class he had found himself thinking out a problem of Latin grammar. In yesterday’s Latin he had worried about his mother’s drinking. And in the middle of French construe he had discovered that he wa
s no longer in love with Becky Lederer, despite their ardent correspondence, but preferred instead one of the Bursar’s daughters. Under the pressures of high office his mind had become a slice of undersea cable like the one in the science lab. First there was this bunch of wires, all carrying their proper messages and doing their appointed jobs; and then, swimming around them like a shoal of invisible fish, ran a whole lot more messages which for some reason did not need wires at all. And that was how his mind felt now, while he honked out the sacred words in his deepest possible voice only to hear them tinkling like cracked bells in a distant room.

  “For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come,” he said.

  He thought of gas balloons and of the Tom who worked in Lloyd’s, and of the forthcoming apocalypse when he failed his common entrance examination, and of the Bursar’s daughter when she rode her bicycle with her blouse flattened against her chest by the wind. And he fretted about whether Carter Major, who was Pandas’ vice-captain, had the qualities of democratic leadership to handle afternoon kickabout. But there was one thought he refused to have at all because really all these other thoughts were surrogates for it. There was one thought he could not put in words or even pictures, because it was so bad that even thinking it could turn it into truth.